An heated discussion recently spread widely on social media, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which some males came online to inform females how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
